PBS Features
Great Vermonter

I want to encourage you and your readers to tune into Vermont Public Television at 10 p.m. on Monday, Jan. 29 to view the PBS special "Power of Choice: The Life and Ideas of Milton Friedman." (It will repeat at 3 a.m. later that night.)

In a biographical note on Professor Friedman, Wikipedia states: "According to The Economist, Friedman ‘was the most influential economist of the second half of the 20th century…possibly of all of it.’" During the program, Alan Greenspan says, "There are very few people over the generations who have ideas that are sufficiently original to materially alter the direction of civilization. Milton is one of those very few people."

I can’t add to all the recognition paid to Professor Friedman’s memory since his death in November at age 94, but I do want to remark that, from the 1930s into the Reagan years, he had a close connection with Orange County and the Upper Valley. On the day following his death, the Valley News recounted how Friedman and his wife, Rose (also an economist) had built a six-sided house on a ridge overlooking Lake Fairlee. That house in West Fairlee and the lake, I think, will appear in the program, as will a view of the rock slides on the western slopes of Mt. Moosilauke.

At least, those scenes were shown during the ceremony where the 2006 Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty was presented to former prime minister of Estonia Mart Laar. When Laar was elected prime minister of Estonia, at age 32, his economic education consisted of little more than his having read "Free to Choose," the 1980 best-selling book the Friedmans wrote together at their West Fairlee home. The ideas espoused in that book have provided inspiration to millions in central Europe who were freed after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Harvey "Bud" Otterman, Jr., current vice chair of the Ways and Means Committee in the Vermont House, told me on Sunday, that when the Friedmans were in Bradford shopping, during their summer stays in West Fairlee (before they moved out to California), Professor Friedman used to drop by Bud’s law office and quiz him about the local economy.

He found Milton to be very down to earth and "interested in the problems of the common man."

Surely, we Vermonters have much we can learn from this remarkable man’s life and ideas. I hope many will enjoy watching this special.

Stephen Webster

Randolph